Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I must again express my fury that, given the shocking content of two reports published this week about the scandalous situation of children and families in homeless accommodation, the senior Minister is not here to respond to this debate. Perhaps it is just indicative of the fact that the situation has become completely indefensible. What the State is now guilty of is nothing short of criminal neglect and child abuse. There is no other way to describe it. When a report suggests that hundreds and hundreds of infants in emergency accommodation are unable to learn to crawl, chew or speak or to have anything like a normal developmental pathway, that is criminal abuse and child abuse. It is the Magdalen laundries of the 21st century waiting to happen. If it continues, we will be looking at redress schemes such as those we saw for the women and girls of the Magdalen laundries. It is utterly shameful.

The Government's attempt to address the homelessness and housing emergency, which its policies have largely created, is now beyond failure. According to the Respond report, only 8% of those entering emergency accommodation - 15% of whom are there for two years or more, 45% of whom are there more than a year, including, I repeat, in excess of 1,000 children - move on to secure social housing. The rest end up in insecure HAP tenancies and are liable to end up homeless again in the near future. The other big cohort end up having to go home into overcrowded conditions with their families or into other emergency accommodation, where the torture, hardship, neglect and abuse continue because of the failure of the Government to provide secure, affordable public housing on scale to address this housing crisis eight years after Fine Gael came to power.

It must be remembered many of these children are now facing into Christmas. The Irish National Teachers Organisation, INTO, and Focus Ireland have had to distribute a resource guide to teachers to deal with homeless children in school because of the stigma they face and the mental trauma they suffer by having to go into school every day in this situation of homelessness and where they cannot bring their friends home or have sleepovers. It is obscene but nothing seems to change. Nothing seems to move the Government.

John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)
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The Minister, Deputy Eoghan Murphy, could not be present but I thank Deputy Boyd Barrett for raising the issue. I saw the coverage of the reports. The Deputy is right to raise those points and they need to be addressed. The developmental issues in children that have been highlighted need to be addressed and are not acceptable.

Supporting individuals and families experiencing homelessness is a priority for the Government. Over the course of Rebuilding Ireland, the Government is committed to meeting the housing needs of more than 138,000 households, with 50,000 homes to be delivered through build, acquisition and lease. The implementation of the plan is well under way and is making progress. We can see this reflected in social housing waiting lists, which have reduced by 26% nationally between 2016 and 2019.

The Government is committed to delivering homes for all of the families currently experiencing homelessness. However, until a home is provided, it is also critical that we provide the appropriate accommodation and supports to households experiencing homelessness. To minimise the use of hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation for emergency accommodation, the Government has provided local authorities with capital funding to develop family hubs. There are currently 30 family hubs in operation nationally, with a total capacity to cater for almost 690 families. Additional hubs will be delivered in the coming months.

Hubs provide more security and stability for homeless families than is possible in hotel accommodation. Families in hubs are supported by the local authorities and their contracted non-governmental organisation service delivery partners to identify and secure appropriate long-term accommodation. The supports available in family hubs assist families to move from emergency accommodation to a home within a shorter timeframe. The annual report released this morning by Respond, for instance, confirms that, on average, families move out of their hubs within six months, with a range of housing responses being provided. These include local authority owned properties, approved housing body properties and housing assistance payment, HAP, supported tenancies in the private rented sector. The objective is to secure a home for a family within a six-month period, although obviously we work to try to ensure that a home is provided within the shortest period possible.

In 2018, 5,135 individual adults and their associated dependants exited homelessness into homes, an increase of 8% on the 2017 figure. In the first half of this year, 2,825 further individual adults and their associated dependants exited homelessness, up 21% on the comparable period in 2018. Next year, it is expected that we will see in excess of 5,500 adults and their associated dependants moving out of homelessness.

The HAP placefinder service plays a vital role in preventing families from entering homelessness in the first place and in housing those families who find themselves in emergency accommodation. Under the placefinder service, all local authorities are now being provided with the options to pay deposits and advance rental payments for any households in emergency homeless accommodation in order to secure accommodation via the housing assistance payment scheme. Local authorities may, dependent on local demand, offer households in emergency accommodation the option to source accommodation themselves or with the assistance of placefinder officers. These officers are being funded by the Department. Some 23 local authorities have such officers in place. More than 9,300 households have been supported by the homeless HAP scheme nationally up to the end of quarter 3 of this year.

Supporting a household to exit from homelessness often requires more than a house; sometimes it requires a broader suite of social and welfare supports. In that context, it is vital that the range of State bodies act in a co-ordinated fashion and a high level inter-agency group, including representatives from key Departments, local authorities, Tusla and the HSE, is in place to support this critical co-ordination objective.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Honestly, for the Government to say council housing lists have reduced makes me want to scream. Does the Minister of State know the reason they have reduced in large part? It is because the Minister has refused to lift the income thresholds. Therefore, every week people are coming into my clinic who have been lopped off the list. They are still desperately in need of housing but because their income has crept up a few euro over the income threshold, which have not been raised for about a decade, they have been knocked off the list. The Government’s new plan to reduce the housing lists is to chop people off the housing lists, and for fewer people to be entitled to social housing even though there are no other options available to them, dragging a whole new cohort of people into the housing crisis. Similarly, the Minister of State mentioning of the HAP scheme makes me want to scream.

I spoke to an person in the HAP placefinder office in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, which is supposed to find HAP tenancies, and she confirmed, not that I did not know this, that one-bedroom apartments in Sandyford are now going for €2,000 a month. The homeless HAP limit for one-bedroom accommodation is €975. People can forget that. Nobody is moving out of homeless accommodation because the money being provided by the State is not enough to bring a person even halfway towards meeting the level of rent required. Even if one managed to get a HAP tenancy, one could be homeless again in six months' time because there is nothing secure about them. Meanwhile in O'Devaney Gardens and sites all over the country, the Government is selling off public land that could be used for public housing to provide secure affordable housing. That is why we are in this mess.

A demonstration of housing protestors will take place on 5 December to coincide with the anniversary of the death of Jonathan Corrie. Those protestors have asked that there would be a debate on solutions to the housing crisis in here on the day of that rally, and I am glad that the Dáil Business Committee has agreed to that. I can tell the Minister of State they are protesting several years after the death of Jonathan Corrie because the Government has not provided any solutions other than ones that have made the situation worse.

John Paul Phelan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy is right in the sense of the need for a review of the income thresholds, which is now happening. I do not accept that the full 26% reduction in the social housing waiting lists is as a result of people's incomes going over the existing thresholds but that review is starting to get in train. It did not happen for a decade because there was a decade when incomes were fairly flat but they are starting to rise, and the Deputy was right to point out that aspect.

I do not like to comment on individual cases but the Jonathan Corrie case was horrific. Many agencies, including the Government, have a responsibility. I emphasise to the Deputy, even though he knows this, that in this particular case and in many others, the part of my reply that referred to the other supports people need to exit homelessness is crucial. Homelessness is caused certainly by economic factors but there are other factors that contribute. We will be proceeding with a review of thresholds. It is timely at this stage but that does not account for the full 26% reduction in the number on the social housing waiting lists.